Culture wars

Anyone appalled at the decision in the Tate Modern privacy case - in which judges ruled in favour of nearby flat owners upset at the Tate's viewing gallery - clearly hasn't been paying enough attention to what's been happening in cities up and down the country for years.

After a neat opening line ("The verdict is in: people who live in glass houses may throw stones with impunity"), the Guardian's Oliver Wainwright makes the crucial point that this is actually nothing new: "The ruling accelerates the long-running phenomenon of new people moving to an area because of particular urban attractions - whether they be pubs, clubs or art galleries - and then relentlessly campaigning to have those very things shut down. It is what destroys cities. The very things that make an area desirable, and prompt the influx of property speculators, are then cast as nuisances to be eradicated. And it doesn't matter who was there first: as the law has it, if someone knowingly moves to an existing nuisance, it is still a nuisance."

I'd suggest that this is a challenge faced far more often by grassroots gig venues than art galleries - most recently the Night & Day in Manchester's Northern Quarter, shamelessly hung out to dry by the city's council.

Nevertheless, let's hope that this latest high-profile incidence has alerted a whole new swathe of people - middle-class art lovers with political and economic clout, who would never set foot in a sticky-floored club - to the issue and mobilises them into doing what they can to reverse a trend that threatens to deaden our most vibrant urban areas.